This model was a mule for the hand-painting and weathering tutorials I did. It was done with limited tools and limited time. And in the end limited patience. Airbrushing really IS better than hand-painting.

Okay, so these aren’t new, I made them to present at SCGMC a while back, but I never gave them official pages so they were buried in the site. Now they have pages and show up under Tips and Advice and Things.

This is a kitbash created by combining the HGUC Zaku I Sniper and standard Zaku I kits to make Ramba Ral’s unit. It was also the “star” of my How to build Gunpla tutorial. Click on the picture above to go to the gallery.

TLDR Version: I moved and I’ve been REALLY busy so not much building and even less posting. But I’m back. Hopefully I’ll stay back.

So it’s been over two years since I updated my blog. I’m still alive and building models but a few things have happened that have kept me from updating Funakatown. The first is that I moved last year. I spent the Spring and Summer preparing to sell my old house, selling my old house, looking for a new house to buy, packing, moving and unpacking. Then the major home improvement work started, and it involved the room that would eventually become my hobby room. From most of the time from April of 2015 through May of 2016 my spray booth was either in storage, in the garage (under or behind a bunch of stuff), or in my room but not really set up right so where I had to clear it off and move things around if I had to use it. And for about half of that year I didn’t even have a workbench. Soooo… yeah. Hard to build models under those circumstances.

Another reason I haven’t posted much is that I often write my posts during breaks at work but over the last two years we’ve been developing and implementing a lot of new things at work. It’s been kind of rough and so when break time comes the last thing I want to do is spend more time at my computer. I go for walks instead. Need to clear my head and smell some fresh air to keep from going crazy.

The other reason I haven’t posted is that my main motivator to post is displaying my completed models, but I didn’t actually complete any models from the beginning of this mess until pretty recently. In early 2015, not too long after the posts stopped, I built a 1/72 Airfix Messerschmitt to compliment the Spitfire I had built the year before and I entered them as a set in one of IPMS Orange County’s monthly contests. The theme for that month highlighted the rivalry between the Messerschmitt and Spitfire.

I got the Messerschmitt 95% done, good enough to take to the meeting, and then left it in that state to work on a 1/20 Bandai Scopedog kit that I planned to enter in another theme contest a couple months later. Like the Messerschmitt, I ended up getting it 95% done in time for the April 2015 IPMS meeting, but didn’t finish it.

That’s when we got full-bore into moving. My workbench and spray booth got taken apart and put into storage and all I could do in the little spare time I had for the next several months was build and hand paint a HG Hi Mock for a tutorial.

By October 2015 the dust was starting to settle on the move. I set up a work bench in the new house and I started a new major project. But I put it aside (because that’s what I do…) to finally finish the Messerschmitt and Scopedog for IPMS Orange County’s yearly OrangeCon contest. After adding antennae, making small repairs, and hand-painting various bits that I had never got around to doing, I’m happy to report both kits took first place in their respective categories.

After that, I weathered the Hi Mock for another tutorial I had planned for the Southern California Gundam Model Competition. Then I photographed it along with the Messerschmitt and Scopedog and I was going to put them up on my blog but then the whirlwind that is the SCGMC happened. Then the holidays, then the remodel started and once again I had to tear down my work bench and spray booth (and my desktop PC with all my pictures and Funakatown-related files). The remodel finally got completed right at the end of May of 2016. After that I quickly finished a Rick Dias (and actually finished it 100%) that I took to the GBWC at Anime Expo. It didn’t win shit…

Then it was back to work sorting out my model kits. They had been stored in big moving boxes and after the remodel I took them all out to discover I have WAY too many model kits. So as I’ve been promising to do before I moved I’ve been selling them off at club meetings and on eBay. Plus I put together a presentation to sell the IPMS club on Gunpla, which went surprisingly well. Plus it was Summer and we were just busy as hell doing Summer stuff with the family. But near the end of summer I finished my Volks Mari Illustrious, my first resin figure. And as I come up on another whirlwind of SCGMC, I thought, it’s really time to update my blog. I really miss being able to pull out my phone and go to my site and show off my latest works, or copy and paste a link or picture for a quick Facebook post.

So the plan is to post WIPs and Galleries for everything I’ve completed in the last couple of years and I hope to keep those rolling out over the next few days so that when I go to SCGMC next weekend I can proudly link to my soon-to-be-updated How To Build Gunpla tutorial without cringing at the thought of people navigating around the rest of the site and realizing it’s a ghost town.

Six months in the making. One hundred and thirty five pages of tools, supplies, tips, suggestions, and techniques. It’ll take you from clipping pieces off sprues, through surface preparation and painting to decal application and washes and there’s even a section on photographing your completed model.

After completing the Core Fighter I repaired the Wing Gundam shadow box project that had been pretty well wrecked in an earthquake we had a few months back. After that I dusted off a project that had been on hold for about 18 months. I had it all ready to paint but when it came time to give it a white shaded paint job, I lost interest. So I grabbed another one of the 6 decal sets I had created for this neat little kit and made Ozma Lee’s gray VF-25S.

To see the gallery, follow the picture link below:

To see the short Work In Progress report, follow the picture link below:

It has been 6 months since I finished a model… but this one’s in the books! It has an Air Force camouflage pattern but Navy weathering. The major decals are my own design and all the little data stencils come from the kit. To make it more detailed I replaced the kit’s seat with a 1/32 scale resin ejection seat from an F/A-18C Hornet and resin wheels from two different scale F-4 Phantoms.